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NEWS ANALYSIS

Editor's Note: On Register Radio April 19, Jeanette De Melo spoke with Register blogger and correspondent Matt Archbold, who has covered the Gosnell Trial. The show airs Fridays at 2 pm Eastern on EWTN Radio stations with encores at 7pm Eastern on Saturdays and 11am Eastern on Sundays. Listen online here.

COMMENTARY

The gruesome details of the Kermit Gosnell murder trial are beginning to soak into the minds of Americans who read the belated news reports on the trial of the Pennsylvania doctor who performed late-term abortions.

Gosnell is charged with murder, in the deaths of a female patient and seven babies prosecutors say survived late-term abortions. As one column noted this week, the facts of the case are so grisly that an online fact-checking site was forced to confirm that the murders actually happened.

Any person who examines the Gosnell case understands that this has the potential to be a game changer for the way much of the culture views abortion in America. The Gosnell case is one that...READ MORE

The lay-run campus encourages students to be part of the New Evangelization.

Those words formed the motto of Warren Carroll, the late founder of Christendom College, and stood at the heart of celebrations surrounding the lay-run Catholic college’s 35th anniversary earlier this month.

More than 300 hundred donors, alumni and VIPs gathered April 6 for Christendom’s 35th anniversary gala at the Westfields Marriott Hotel in Chantilly, Va., to celebrate the college’s legacy of providing Catholic education since 1977 and raise funds for student financial aid.

“This is so important to us, as we do not accept and will not accept any federal aid when it comes to the support for our students and our program at...READ MORE

Archbishop Gomez encourages an immigration reform 'that restores the rule of law in a humane and just manner.'

WASHINGTON — Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles applauded the introduction of legislation to change the U.S. immigration system, while pledging the bishops’ help in reviewing and improving the proposal.

“The U.S. bishops look forward to carefully examining the legislation and working with Congress to fashion a final bill that respects the basic human rights and dignity of newcomers to our land — migrants, refugees and other vulnerable populations,” he said April 17.

Archbishop Gomez, the chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Migration, refrained from commenting on specific details of the bill — which is more than 800 pages in length — until the U.S. bishops’ conference can...READ MORE

Russell Shaw, in his new book, American Church, argues that there are large amounts of “Catholics in name only,” due to the cultural assimilation of Catholics into the mainstream.

DENVER — To counter decades of Catholics becoming absorbed into secular American culture, noted author and journalist Russell Shaw is proposing a new Catholic “subculture” committed to evangelization.

“We're no longer evangelizing the culture; we’ve been evangelized by it. And it’s not good for the secular culture, and it’s destroying us as a religious community,” Shaw told Catholic News Agency on April 16.

“My critique of Americanism and of cultural assimilation is very real,” he explained. “What has happened has turned out not to be in the best interest of the Catholic Church in the U.S., but no one started out with bad intentions.”

Over the past few decades, attempts to limit religious freedom in the public square have expanded into what is nearing a hostile exile.

This hostility led the then-sitting Congress to overwhelmingly enact the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act to further protect First Amendment freedoms. And it is what has now led a much smaller number in Congress to introduce the Health Care Conscience Rights Act to further protect those freedoms against the Affordable Care Act’s abortion-pill mandate and other mandates that threaten freedom of conscience.

But the abortion-pill decree is perhaps the most serious and recent incarnation of the administration’s hostility to religion.